Sunday, February 1, 2009

My five-year-old was looking on while I read the geology blog feed this morning, and was impressed by the images of RedoubtandAsama on Eruptions and The Volcanism Blog. So he responded with his own volcano art:

Those are two giant rivers of lava on each side of the volcano, and an extremely shallow sill feeding the eruption. And I think the magma chamber is sitting on top of a loosely packed gravel deposit. This is the first of four pictures, which illustrate show lightning strikes that penetrate into the mantle, a gigantic landslide (which somehow ends up on the opposite side of the volcano from its scarp), and a hurricane that eventually cools the lava.

(By the way... why does WGBH have a picture of Pu'u O'o on the cover of a movie about Pinatubo now? The original image was the right volcano, if I remember correctly. BTW, if anyone is looking for a good volcano movie to show in class, I recommend In the Path of a Killer Volcano, even with the wrong volcano on the cover. Real life is more dramatic than fiction in some cases.)

4 comments:

"In the Path of a Killer Volcano" has been a part of my Intro Geology, Environmental Geology, and even Petrology classes for as long as I've been teaching. Here's my Pinatubo assignment - pretty much unchanged since I originally wrote it.

For as long as I have owned copies of "In the Path of a Killer Volcano" (and I own two VHS copies and one DVD) the image of the lava fountain at Pu'u O'o has graced the cover. There's an image of Pinatubo on the back, but the front has always been Pu'u O'o. My earliest copy was purchased when I was a grad student at UW-Madison and had the original (unedited for sensitive high-schooler ears) audio track. Unfortunately this copy has become unplayable over the years due to heavy use. Both the second VHS copy and the more recently released DVD copy have a "butchered" soundtrack that silences all of the mildly strong language that (IMHO) was an important part of setting the context of realtime eruption prediction efforts. If anyone has a functional copy of the original VHS tape with the full audio track I'd be really interested in acquiring it.

At one point I also had a copy of the NOVA episode about Mount St. Helens, "Anatomy of a Volcano" (NOVA Season 8, Episode 16) but to my unending chagrin I seem to have lost or misplaced that copy. I'd REALLY like to get a copy of that if someone can help me out - it's probably one of the single most memorable NOVA episodes ever produced (right up there with "In the Path of a Killer Volcano") and probably the single most important NOVA episode that inspired me to get into geology in the first place. Most relevent to the current post, though, the producers began the scientific explanation of volcanic plumbing in the St. Helens episode with a kid's crayon drawing of a volcano.

Hanging on by my nails...

About Me

I'm a forty-something tenured geology professor at a small public college in the Rockies. I love mountains - hiking in them, looking at them, studying them.
You can reach me at shearsensibility at gmail dot com.
My opinions are my own - not my employer's, not my students', not my spouse's, not my graduate advisor's... just mine.